


A Trifle

by Lohrendrell



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Child Death, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Major Original Character(s), Non-Graphic Violence, Whump, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-07 20:41:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,397
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26803792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lohrendrell/pseuds/Lohrendrell
Summary: The life and death of a witcher-to-be.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 11
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	A Trifle

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Whumptober 2020. Prompt nº 4: Buried Alive.

_This is how it goes:_

**He is four years old** when he’s taken to Kaer Morhen. He never heard of the place before, but he did hear about witchers, and he bawls in the man’s arms when he realizes what’s going on. Witchers eat children who misbehave.

“Nobody’s gonna eat you,” the man says.

He hugs the man’s neck, hides his face in the smelly beard. “You promise?”

The man doesn’t answer. He asks him where his mommy is, why he needs to go with him, and a bunch of other things, but he gets no response. The man barely talks.

It takes him a while to realize that the man is a witcher. The witcher doesn’t eat him, but he doesn’t hug him when he’s scared, no matter how much he begs. Not even when wolves howl all around them in the middle of the night, making him aware of how tiny he is for the first time in his life. Not even when a monster tries to attack them on their way up a mountain, and the witcher has to slice it in half with a big, shiny sword.

The mountain they climb is tall and scary, and he feels alone by the witcher’s side. It is beautiful, though, because there’s a lot of snow. He’s never seen snow before, although he heard about it in fairy tales, the ones with icy queens and snow-white knights. He thinks how nice it would be, to be a knight made of snow, a brave heart and a shiny sword to save princesses.

**He is five years old** , and he’s learned two things: life is painful, and he is to become a witcher.

He has a weird name, so they shorten it, or just call him something else. He doesn’t like it, but they don’t care. Trivialities, they say, and that’s the third thing he learns in Kaer Morhen: it means it doesn’t matter.

It doesn’t matter that he doesn’t like the food, it doesn’t matter that it makes his belly hurt sometimes, it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t like the cold, or the neverending snow, or that he misses his mommy. “You don’t even remember her name,” they tell him, and it’s true, but it hurts when they say that. He feels less than a child, then, less than the monsters that witchers are supposed to kill, because at least they take the monsters seriously.

It doesn’t matter if he doesn’t want to become a witcher, either.

“I want to be an earl,” he says one day, feeling brave in a moment of irritation. It’s the one thing he remembers from before—before Kaer Morhen, before bestiaries, before getting his arse kicked every day in training.

They laugh at him. “Do you even know what that is?”

He doesn’t. But he doesn’t know what a witcher is, exactly, except that they are supposed to go out someday and kill monsters. So, “It’s trivial,” he tells them, and they laugh harder.

What he says doesn’t matter, though. It makes no difference. He needs to finish all his chores if he wants to be allowed dinner, or go to sleep.

**He is six** when he learns how to read. He loves it. Because of it he gets to spend time in the library, which is the warmest room in the entire keep. It also means he doesn’t have to listen to the instructors yelling at him and the other trainees all day long; he doesn’t have to endure the stench of the horses, or trample on cold, wet, disgusting snow just because he was told to.

Even if all he gets to read are bestiaries—he remembers someone from before, a lady, he doesn’t know who anymore, reading stories about dragons and knights; she used to read to all the kids in the village some afternoons, and he loved it—it’s still nice enough. He is so well-behaved that, after only a couple of months, they grant him access to the library without supervision. He can tell some of the pups are jealous, while some others don’t understand why he prefers to stay inside when they were finally allowed to play with the training dummies. They have games of who can rip the dummies first with only teeth and nails; the winner gets half of everyone else’s dinner for that night.

He doesn’t care about these games, or about what they think. He much prefers being left alone.

**He is seven** when he gets his first wolf pup—a real one. They say the mother died from a harpy attack, and the pups won’t survive without someone to care for them. “Much like yourselves,” they say. “You wouldn’t survive if it weren’t for us. We’re a pack, and it’s time for you to learn how to care for another living being.”

There are only five pups, which means only the best pups—the human ones—will get one. They choose him, Szymon, Geralt, Eskel, and Jerzy.

He follows all the instructions, tying the legs of the goats and letting his pup nurse all it wants, even if it leaves the goats bleeding. He teaches it to attack the training dummies, and to not jump him when he’s eating. The others do the same—the pup masters, they call themselves.

Someone tries to kill Jerzy’s pup out of jealousy, and what follows is a stabbing and the first real attack from a wolf inside the keep. The jealous boy doesn’t cry for the instructors, though—all of them have learned by now that crying doesn’t get them anything worthy.

He loves his pup, his best friend, his companion of all hours. He doesn’t name it, per the instructors’ orders (rather, doesn’t tell him the pup’s name is Earl).

He and Earl are a team in cold Kaer Morhen, where seven to eight months of the year it snows, where they’re so hidden nobody could ever find them, not even their mommies, even if they, by some miracle, were worried about them.

He wishes he had fur like Earl’s. It would keep him warm. It would be nice.

Not even a year later, they deem Earl big enough to be released into the wild. It’s dangerous to keep it inside, they say, because of the horses and goats and the little ones. Wolves are wild creatures, can’t be tamed no matter what kind of training they are given. “Why did you give them to us, then?” he asks, but they don’t answer, just take Earl away.

He hides and cries, and feels ashamed about it until he catches Eskel and Geralt and Jerzy and Szymon doing the same. He doesn’t tell on them, and they don’t tell on him. He’s learned it from Geralt and Eskel, who are always pulling pranks around the keep, but never tell on each other, and now he understands why.

**He is eight** , and according to the fencing instructors, one of the worst of his class. Not that the others are much better—except for Henrik, but Henrik is too violent for his size, they say. The instructors have arguments about how young they are for fencing lessons until, one day, they order them to stop training. They are also forbidden to even step into the training grounds, now that they had a taste of retaliation (he doesn’t know what that word means). Instead, they are directed to tend to the horses, to clean armours, to collect herbs and vegetables outside the keep.

It is trivial to try to run away. If The Killer doesn’t get at them, some kind of monster will. Or a witcher coming back from The Path. Or maybe they will just shoot an arrow on his back and call it a day. So he doesn’t try escaping, not even once.

On these new assignments, though, he is the best in his year. These are not trivial tasks, and he always executes them with perfection, and he wants to cry when the instructors tell him he’s a good lad.

**He is nine** when they start to feed them some kind of nasty paste. It makes his belly ache. He throws up every day. He also feels like beating everyone up. On the worst days, he just wants to make something bleed.

They separate them from the littlest pups, but the older pups’ dormitory is no better or more accommodating. They are the smallest in there at the beginning, and there are only a couple of mattresses for all of them, but every couple of months there are less pups and they get to grab their own. Once a year, there is a purge, and he fights for the best mattresses left vacant. Most times, he gets his ass beaten by Eskel, who shares it with Geralt.

On the worst of the worst days, the instructors lock him in a cold room. “He’s a strong one,” he hears one of them saying outside the room. “Feisty, fearless. He’s gonna be a good witcher.”

“He’s too impulsive,” another one says, “he feels too much.”

“Oh, come on. He’s a pup. Not even went to the trials yet. Give him time.”

They praise him behind locked doors, but they leave him there to starve and freeze for two days and two nights. And so, “I want my mommy!” he screams, the next best thing to do when they won’t let him out, won’t let him near a knife. “My pup’s name is Earl!” he howls into the night, vindictive, “I named it, and it’s mine! And I don’t like it here! I hate Kaer Morhen! I wish every single one of you were dead!”

If they listen—he knows they do, he’s learned of their heightened senses by now—they don’t mind. Some part of him thinks it is trivial, but he can’t bring himself to care.

**He is ten** , and he bleeds everyday, gets beaten everyday. His body is a tapestry of bruises, a painting of purple, black and red. He’s got cuts that leave him aching even under warm water, and form gross scabs that itch and bleed even more when he yanks them.

The instructors distribute tiny portions of the soothing balms the oldest witchers, the maimed ones who have retired from the Path, make. They say the reason for that is because they need to learn to ratio for The Path. The pups do learn to ratio, also to share. They are too old to steal from each other now. Maybe they learned that backstabbing is not worth it, both for the beating it earns them, and for the circle of vengeance that never stops escalating—not until the instructors break it off with even harsher punishments.

One of the pups dies one day in training. Not from the blows of the training swords, nor for the instructor’s beatings. He simply falls to the ground one afternoon, it’s not even that cold. The pup is feverish, mumbling gibberish, and judging by the face of the instructors, they don’t know what’s going on either.

They separate the sick pup from them, as they always do, and order them to keep training. The news arrives at the dormitory later, when the pup doesn’t come back to sleep.

He thinks he hears someone crying, but he’s not sure. He doesn’t dare ask, unwilling to get his arm bitten again.

**He is eleven** when they put him through the Trial of the Grasses. His entire year goes together, as they always go to everything.

It hurts.

It hurts a lot.

He can’t even recall if something ever hurt that much—but then again, he can’t recall much from his days before being kidnapped to Kaer Morhen.

The pups are all howling—no, they aren’t pups, they’re children; they aren’t howling, they’re crying. Begging. Begging for it to stop.

It just hurts so much.

There’s the smell of blood, urine, feces and vomit all around him. He stops screaming at some point; some also do, others don’t. He goes still with his eyes open. It hurts.

When it’s over, maybe a day or two later, they say, “It’s done.” It doesn’t make sense, because it hasn’t stopped hurting, even if the others have stopped bawling.

The instructors survey the room. “This one didn’t make it,” they say, more often than, “This one did.” He thinks he hears Eskel’s and Geralt’s short-winded calls for each other.

“This one didn’t make it,” someone says by his side, and it takes him a while to understand he means _him_.

What? He thinks as the instructor says, “Such a shame. He was a tenacious one.”

He tries to scream, to no avail. He tries to move, but he’s paralized. He’s learned a long time ago that he doesn’t really get to do the things he wants, but this is different. This is too much. He doesn’t know what is happening; nothing is happening, except that everything is.

Eskel and Geralt are carried away, alive. They are the only two who survived, he comprehends, but it doesn’t make sense, because he’s still here. He’s still here. He’s still here!

_This is how it goes:_

**There is no ceremony** when they place the bodies of the pups in the hole dug into the dirt. They do it gently, at least. Softly, almost caringly.

His heart has stopped, but it hasn’t. It’s so slow, beating so soft, they can’t hear it. His mind is a whirlwind, though. He tries to fill his lungs, but they don’t work properly. He’s immovable. He doesn’t know how he’s alive, but he is, but nobody else knows it. It’s daylight, the sun warms up the dirt and burns his eyes, but he doesn’t care. He watches the sun anyway, because at least the last thing he’ll see isn’t snow. He never wanted to be a witcher. He wants to be an earl. What does an earl even do? He tastes dirt in his mouth, it’s filthy, and there are worms and corpses surrounding him. He’s alive, but only he knows it. He’s free. He doesn’t want to die, but he has no say in this. He never had a say in anything. It’s trivial. He’s alive, but only he knows it. He’s already dead, but only he doesn’t know it.

The hurting never stops.

Until it does.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments make me smile <3


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